A look into Chinaccelerator’s women-led portfolio companies
Editorial Note: This was written by David Bartle, Fiona Lavroff and QI Tianxing for NüWomen as part of Tsinghua University’s Global Business Journalism program.
China’s digital economy generates more than 30 trillion yuan a year, which represented 34.8% of China’s entire GDP in 2018, according to a UN report.
Yet women only founded 10% of digital startups in the same year, despite forming 66% of the Chinese labor force and contributing 41% of the Asian giant’s GDP.
But women entrepreneurs have a valuable ally. Chinaccelerator, the first startup accelerator launched in China in 2011, offers fledgling companies a six-month program in which startups are given professional mentorship and significant investments. Over 40% of the ventures in its 170 business portfolio are founded or co-founded by women — more than double the national average.
Operated by venture capitalist company SOSV, Chinaccelerator is marketed towards tech startups seeking to cross borders into and out of China. Two-thirds of their portfolio companies are owned by non-Chinese founders.
Some startups — such as Piktochart, Bonzun and TravelRight — are multinational, while others like Spare Leash and PlanHouse focus on China.
“We were quite fortunate to find Chinaccelerator as they had a huge network of mentors who were mainly expatriates based in China,” said Piktochart co-founder Ai Ching for TechInAsia. “Finding a mentor who is experienced in our sector […] and with the passion to really help us is not easy.”
Today, Piktochart is used by 11 million people worldwide.
The accelerator provides a six-month growth and fundraising period, $150,000 USD in investment, one-on-one mentorships, office space and access to its broader community to qualifying startups.
Spare Leash — a digital platform that matches pet owners with pet sitters, trainers, pet insurance and products — went through the program in 2018. The project was founded in 2017 by Erin Leigh and Elsa Medin in Shanghai.
“Basically, Spare Leash was two girls with a phone and an Excel spreadsheet to start,” Leigh said. “It was fake it until you make it for the first year — and then when we got to Chinaccelerator.”
Chinaccelerator helped Leigh and Medin develop into an internet platform to meet growing demand for pet walkers and sitters starting in 2018. Through the program, they were able to hire a tech developer and build their website and WeChat services.
“We’ve bootstrapped and then we’ve been profitable — knock on wood — since day one, we haven’t really been active in the raising community since [the program]. We are probably going to raise by the end of this year because we have some more tech-heavy ideas that we would like to add,” Leigh said.
Some of the startups helped by the Beijing accelerator are headquartered abroad. Based in Sweden, Bonnie Roupé founded Bonzun in 2015 to provide women with unbiased medical information concerning pregnancy in 95 countries.
Roupe said in an email that Chinaccelerator gave Bonzun the contacts needed to meet challenges. Through the program, Roupe learned how to create and analyze metric data to track growth and make decisions.
Bonzun specifically sought to expand into China, where the stigmatization of in vitro fertilization prevents women from openly discussing their options. The IVF app went through Chinaccelerator’s 2016 program and nearly five years later is now focused on growth outside of China.
“It’s different being an outsider in the Chinese ecosystem and it’s great to be able to learn from others,” Roupe said in an email. “Tech in China is very different from the Western world. So many [lessons learned] from the U.S. don’t apply here.”
While the program is majority foreign entrepreneurs entering or starting in the Chinese market, one-third of the Beijing accelerator’s portfolio companies are Chinese. Some are even so-called “sea turtles” who left China for education and experiences overseas and returned.
After living in France for eight years, three-time founder Sophie Sun returned to China with the idea for her second project TravelRight, founded in 2018. She said as part of Chinaccelerator’s Batch 16 in 2019, TravelRight received the place to work and the welcome she needed to build her business.
“I had support immediately around me and Chinaccelerator’s three-month program was very intensive,” Sun said.
The initial three months of programs are dedicated to growth followed by a three-month fundraising period. Sun said Chinaccelerator teaches entrepreneurs about product mindset and how to market their products to investors.
“I think they really taught me how to pitch to people because I was good at sales, but since I joined Chinaccelerator, I realized this is a new way to learn,” Sun said.
Following pitching, Sun said she learned how to improve as a manager and define company culture. She wanted her employees to be comfortable at work and not be ignored as she chases investors — and push back against China’s 996 culture of working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. for six days a week.
As travel between China and the EU dramatically fell due to the pandemic and TravelRight became dormant, she recognized the cost of 60-hour entrepreneur work weeks.
“I started to make my very first friends during the pandemic,” Sun said. “It’s been almost a year in China and I’m starting to meet my first friends. I realized I shouldn’t live like that because if I lost my business, I would lose everything.”
Two years following her program, Sun was inspired to start WeChat mini-app PlanHouse with the help from her Chinaccelerator mentor and the startup community. PlanHouse allows users to organize offline activities, such as hiking or concerts.
Sun noticed — from her own life and backed by data — that many Chinese people get into their 30s without discovering themselves and forming hobbies due to academic and professional pressure. Like many of the women helped by Chinaccelerator, she is thankful for the chance for a new start in her professional life.
“We discover we are extremely boring people. So we start to develop our personal interests,” Sun said. “I want to do things differently if I have a second chance. I received a lot of help actually from Chinaccelerator. It’s still a very great place for founders no matter what.”
